Self standing ironing board structures are well known, including an ironing board on which clothes may be ironed to press out wrinkles and supporting legs. Typically, the supporting legs consist of a pair of legs pivotally secured at intermediate points in a scissors fashion, with one of the legs being pivotally secured to the underside of the ironing board and the other leg being adjustably secured to the ironing board. The legs may be selectively moved between a standing position in which the legs are generally X-shaped and a storage position in which the legs are generally parallel to one another and to the ironing board.
With some ironing boards, pivoting scissor legs have been provided with mechanisms to lock or selectively restrict the relative pivoting of the legs, with the mechanisms thereby used to secure the legs in their storage position. However, particularly after years of use, such mechanisms can undesirably hinder pivoting even when such pivoting is desired when changing the legs positions.
In other configurations, one leg is pivotally secured to the underside of the ironing board and the other leg has an end slidably secured to the underside of the ironing board, with sliding movement of the other leg being selectively limited to secure the legs in either the standing or storage position. However, the mechanisms by which the sliding movement of the other leg may be limited are also subject to undesirable binding when changing the leg positions.
In still other configurations, one leg is pivotally secured to the underside of the ironing board and the other leg is selectively secured to the ironing board only in the storage and standing positions, with the other leg being freely pivotable between positions. While such pivoting is simple, securing the other leg at each position may be problematic.
Further, while many different ironing board structures have been provided, among those different structures many common components are often used. For example, a single design of a ironing board may advantageously used by a manufacturer with many different supporting leg configurations. However, conversion between such different supporting legs may disadvantageously require many different components for each leg structure, including components on the common ironing board itself.
The present invention is directed toward overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.